Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  My aunt is prowling around like an animal which has caught the long-lost scent of home. She calls me over, her voice trembling with emotion. ‘Look!’ she points. On the fence, I can discern the faint imprint of some old structure. She’s almost dancing with excitement. ‘This is where we used to have our Sukkah! We ate our meals together there on Sukkoth, under the awning that Father erected.’

  She runs over to the ground floor balcony which is heaped with old boxes and rusting scraps of metal. ‘We used to keep our fridge there. And over there, against the shed, we had a pear tree. It had big yellow pears. We children weren’t allowed to pick them, but I was such a tomboy, sometimes I climbed the tree and raided it!’ As she speaks, lost in happy nostalgia, I recall her brother Izio’s account of those same pears which he coveted as a boy. I can still hear his resentful voice saying: ‘I used to look at those big pears which my father placed on brown paper to ripen and longed to have one, but they were only for the visitors. If I wanted one, I had to steal it.’ It amazes me that these two siblings who grew up in the same house react so differently to the same incident. The memory that makes her smile brings a hurt expression to his face. Then it strikes me that no two children ever grow up in the same way in the same family or remember their childhood in the same way. Personalities affect perceptions and filter memories.

  Aunty Slawa and I knock on the door of the ground floor flat where my grandparents used to live, and as she presses the key-shaped bell, she stares at it in disbelief. It’s the same one. The woman who opens the door lets us in, and I stand in a long, sunny room facing the street. This used to be the sitting room, where the piano used to stand with the embroidered shawl thrown over the well-polished top. It was from this window that my cousin Krysia used to peer on Saturdays, quaking with fear as she watched the Chassids walking to synagogue in their large black fur hats.

  Aunty Slawa is chuckling. ‘I used to climb through that window when I came home after a date so my parents wouldn’t know how late I was!’ As she talks, my mind is whirring. This is the house where my father grew up, where eleven strong-minded children lived with their religious father and overworked mother. I imagine my father, running around outside and kicking a cloth ball in the yard until Daniel calls him inside. Overwhelmed, I long to sit here by myself, alone with my thoughts and feelings, to give the phantoms of the past enough time to emerge from the shadows. But we only have a few rushed moments, so I press the shutter, take one final look, and leave.

  Later, over iced coffee and strawberry ice cream in the Glowny Rynek, a troupe of folk musicians in red boots and streaming ribbons serenade us with nostalgic melodies of old Krakow and a hawker pushes a barrow with the crusty salt-encrusted bagels called obwarzanki which my mother used to buy me after school. Aunty Slawa has become pensive. She feels isolated and misses the family. Apart from her brothers Jean and Marcel whom she sometimes visited while escorting tours to Paris, she hasn’t seen much of her family in the past fifty years.

  She used to long for her sisters to invite her to Israel. ‘I hadn’t seen Lunia since 1939 and wanted to see her and Andzia so much, but I couldn’t afford to go to Israel. I was thrilled when Lunia invited me to come a few years ago, but at the last moment she withdrew the invitation, claiming she was ill. She was probably ashamed of the way I looked. Or else she didn’t want me to see how she’d aged.’ Slawa got her wish when her niece Krysia, Andzia’s daughter, invited her to Israel for a holiday several years ago. But the attractive, elegant young women she remembered now resembled ancient ruins. ‘I would never have recognised Lunia,’ she shakes her head in dismay. ‘She was so old and frail in her wheelchair but her mind was as sharp as ever. She recognised me straightaway but Andzia had no idea who I was.’

  All around us, Glowny Rynek is bustling with activity. A flock of pigeons swoop down in front of the Mariacki Church and take off again over the stalls of roses, carnations and gladioli, their wings flapping above our heads. A hawker in bright red boots and embroidered jacket is plying tourists with peacock feathers. Sharp-eyed gypsies accost tourists with wheedling voices while their probing hands are tugging at their bags. With a loving smile my aunt says: ‘My darling Danusia, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you’ve come to see me. I always loved the whole family, and I miss everyone so much.’ She lapses into silence. Suddenly the smile vanishes and the happy facade is stripped bare as lifelong resentments spill onto the piazza. ‘After Mietek died, not one of my brothers or sisters made any effort to get me to join them. I was left here all alone.’

  CHAPTER 35

  In 1950 Slawa was struggling to make ends meet in Poland, Avner was struggling to make a living in America, and my father was struggling to pass exams in Australia, but their eldest sister Lunia had already established a sewing school in Tel-Aviv. When she and her husband Berus had arrived in Palestine in 1940, she bought three sewing machines, turned her living room into a classroom and Madame Stella’s Sewing School was open for business. A lifelong fascination with fashion, along with her satiny charm and steely confidence, ensured her success.

  ‘All I knew about tailoring was from the brief sewing course I did in Bucharest on our way to Palestine. At first, I was only one step ahead of my pupils,’ she tells me in the garden of the Beth-Hadekel Nursing Home outside Tel-Aviv. ‘I often had to dash into the bedroom and close the door so that they wouldn’t see me looking things up in my notebook! But eventually my school was so successful that when Krysia arrived in Tel-Aviv, she came to work for me.’

  On the drive back to Tel-Aviv, past fields of watermelons, olive groves, and flat-roofed buildings on dry, dusty streets, my cousin Krysia talks about her decision to migrate to Israel forty years earlier. ‘You’ll probably find this odd,’ she says, ‘but in 1950 the idea of living in a country full of Jews terrified me.’ Deep in her heart, she was still a frightened child peering out of her grandparents’ window at shadowy men in black beards, black hats and long black coats, still the hunted girl who knew that being Jewish meant death.

  That evening in Tel-Aviv I meet other cousins who also found it difficult to be Jewish again after the war. We’ve all gathered at Alina Erlich’s. Everyone is talking at once, Polish and Ivrit, glasses are clinking, and we’re all trying to work out how we’re related. ‘My father and your mother…no, my grandfather and your uncle…’ Alina and Dov’s grandfather Ignacy and my grandmother Lieba were brother and sister. Their father Kuba Spira, was my father’s cousin. He and Hela Kwasniewska were the only two of Ignacy’s five children to survive the war.

  After spending the war years on Aryan papers, Alina found it difficult to adjust to being Jewish again. ‘I didn’t feel Jewish and I didn’t want to be Jewish,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t until Israel became a nation in 1948 that I started feeling proud of being Jewish. My parents had permits for Australia, but I thought, why go to Australia when we have our own country?’

  Krysia’s husband Marcel Ginzig is nodding in agreement. While Krysia had been reluctant to live in a nation of Jews, Marcel couldn’t wait to reach the Promised Land. Marcel was an idealist who’d been educated at Krakow’s Hebrew Gymnasium which imbued its pupils with a love for Palestine. When World War II broke out, Marcel at sixteen was already familiar with the geography of Palestine, the concept of a kibbutz, and the inspiring songs of the pioneers.

  Forty years after their arrival in Israel, he is still an idealist, a retired school teacher with a deliciously dry sense of humour. He speaks with a quiet intensity, and often ends his sentences with a bemused questioning ‘Hm?’ In their flat which is decorated with Krysia’s paintings and sculptures, I list all the places I’m going to visit in Israel: Haifa, Kinneret, Safed, Jerusalem, Ein Gedi, Masada, Beersheva…With a deadpan expression, he asks, ‘And what will you do in the afternoon, hm?’

  The only son of indulgent, loving parents, Marcel had led a charmed life in Krakow before the war. He had a shiny new bicycle, a real leather football, and a father who bought whatever he w
anted. His friends nicknamed him ‘Daddy-Will-Pay Ginzig’ because whenever he bought anything, he used to tell the merchant breezily, ‘Daddy will pay.’ At the thought of those happy, far-off days when there were still mothers, fathers, sisters and school friends, Marcel sighs. ‘There were fifty-two pupils in my class when war broke out. Only six of us survived.’

  Bursts of laughter and guttural conversations float up to Krysia’s small balcony which overlooks the street. While she puts out herrings, pickled cucumbers and cheese for our supper in their cosy little flat, Marcel takes out a small, faded photograph with bruised edges. He handles it like a priceless talisman, and that’s exactly what it is.

  It’s the only photograph he has of his mother Frederyka, his father Dawid, and his twelve-year-old sister Halinka. ‘I kept that photograph with me all through the war,’ he says, ‘Even in the camps when we weren’t allowed to keep anything, I folded it up and slipped it between the sole and the heel of my shoe, and that’s where it stayed through all the years I spent in concentration camps. The photograph survived: the people on it did not.’

  By night Marcel often revisits Auschwitz in his dreams, and after all these years he still screams in his sleep. As he starts talking, the large crimson sun slides down the cloudless sky and melts into the Mediterranean. Night falls quickly in the Levant and soon it’s dark outside, but the darkness that closes in around us has nothing to do with the time of day.

  In his understated way, Marcel begins. ‘We were evacuated from Auschwitz in January 1945. Our March of Death had begun.’ In that bitter winter, when they could already hear the artillery of the American army in the distance, the Nazis forced their emaciated captives to flee at gunpoint from those who were coming to rescue them. Camp survivors, who were so weak that they could hardly stand on their wooden clogs wrapped in rags, had to take care not to stumble on the icy ground because anyone who fell was shot. ‘There were over three hundred in our group when we started, but they shot so many along the way that soon only about twelve remained.’

  Shuffling alongside Marcel during the forced march was Henek, his old school friend from the Hebrew Gymnasium who had been with him in Plaszow, Ostrowiec and Auschwitz. ‘If we hadn’t had each other, we both would have perished,’ he says. ‘We kept each other going. I wouldn’t eat a bite without giving him half, and he did the same.’ Marcel grimaces. ‘Conditions at Auschwitz were so dreadful that some fathers and sons tore scraps of food out of each other’s mouths, but somehow my pal and I kept each other going.’ There were times when Marcel had felt so desperate that he was ready to hurl himself against the electrified fence to end the suffering, but each time his friend had managed to give him enough hope to keep him alive one more day.

  ‘He was staggering beside me when a guard shot him,’ Marcel recalls. ‘The bullet went straight through his jaw. He was covered in blood and couldn’t close his mouth. When we passed a well beside the road, I took his hand and somehow led him to it. They’d posted an SS man to guard the well to make sure that we couldn’t drink any water, but I wasn’t going to let him stop me. Supporting my pal with one hand, I grabbed the German’s sleeve with the other, and pushed him away from the well. He could have shot me on the spot, but he was probably too startled. I took off the rotting blanket I’d wrapped around me against the cold, tore off a strip, soaked it in water and tied it around Henek’s head.

  ‘For the next three weeks he walked on with my filthy lice-infested blanket over the gaping hole in his face. Believe it or not, by the time we reached Karlsbad, his wound had healed, and all he had to show for it was a small scar and one missing tooth. By some miracle, the bullet had missed all the nerves that connect with the brain!’

  When I ask how his friend managed to eat like that, Marcel widens his eyes in mock amazement. ‘Eat? Eat what? Who ate? Did you think we were at a party? One day the German guards tossed rotting potatoes into the ditch and laughed to see starving people flinging ourselves on food. My pal was just about to join them but I held him back. “Keep away, that one rotten potato isn’t going to save your life, but it could kill you,” I hissed in his ear. And that’s how it turned out because as soon as people started running for the potatoes, those guards started shooting at them. They were bored and wanted a bit of fun.

  ‘The next thing I remember is opening my eyes and thinking that I must have died and gone to heaven because angels with white haloes were hovering around me. I was in a Czech hospital staffed by nuns. I’d been lying in a ditch, left for dead among a pile of bodies, when an American tank stopped to see if anyone was still alive. Luckily one of the soldiers noticed a spark of life and brought me to the hospital. One of the nuns picked me up and carried me as easily as if I was a child. I was twenty-two, weighed thirty-eight kilos and my bones ground against each other.’

  That hospital was to be Marcel’s home for six months. He points to the scars which still indent his jaw and forehead. Blood poisoning had reached the brain and he had to undergo six operations to drain out the pus. While he was lying in bed, weak and in pain after surgery, he was grief-stricken because, after all they’d gone through together, it seemed as though his friend hadn’t survived the death march. Suddenly he looked up and his heart almost burst out of his chest. Walking towards him was Henek. The Americans had taken him to a different hospital and he’d just been discharged. Marcel smiles. ‘To this day we always call each other on the date when the Americans found us, because that’s our real birthday, that’s when we were born again!’

  When Marcel was well enough to leave hospital in October 1945, he made his way back to Krakow to begin the sad search for surviving relatives. The last time he saw Krakow, he had a mother, father and sister, and life bloomed with promise. Now, at twenty-two, he was alone and disoriented in a meaningless world which had allowed his parents to be murdered along with his twelve-year-old sister. Exhausted and depressed, he wondered why he’d returned. He found work as a turner in a factory and soon learned that vodka was a good anaesthetic.

  Although his boss helped him obtain a government scholarship so that he could study at night, Krakow had too many sad memories, there was nothing to anchor him there. When the State of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948, Marcel felt something stirring in his blood.

  By then he’d met Krysia and wanted to marry her. Looking fondly at his wife, he says, ‘She looked the image of the Madonna. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her.’ Krysia smiles with embarrassment but looks pleased. At sixty she still has that serene face, the almond-shaped grey-green eyes and the slow, resonant voice. As Krysia was still at school when they met, Marcel used to write absence notes for her after she skipped classes to go out with him. They married before her nineteenth birthday.

  When they arrived in Israel in 1950, Haifa dazzled them with its golden sand, wooded hills, and vistas of dark blue ocean. Their accommodation, however, was less enticing. They were staying at a transit camp consisting of hundreds of American canvas army tents and corrugated iron huts.

  Within a few months Marcel was appointed to a school in Tiberias, where their little daughter Ronit was born in 1953. Although Krysia thought that she’d been prepared for the hardships of life in this new land, she was shocked by the rough conditions and the heat. ‘Do you have any idea what Tiberias is like in summer?’ she shudders. ‘An inferno.’ Apart from the heat, which sapped her energy day and night, everything was in short supply in this new land which had been forced to fight for its existence from the moment it had come into being. Apart from bread, tomatoes and oranges, everything was rationed. They were entitled to two or three eggs and a hundred grams of chicken per week.

  But Israel was refreshingly friendly and informal. This was a nation of refugees who understood one another and shared a common past and similar goals. Possessions were unimportant. Marcel owned two shirts, a white one for Saturdays and a khaki one for everyday. ‘We all had ration books with coupons. If one of us needed a pair of shoes, we both had to save our coupons.�
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  But that didn’t matter, Marcel says. ‘Don’t forget that everyone was equal. No-one was living in penthouses. My boss was my mate. And it was the same in the army. Jews worked as bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers. Before I got a teaching job, I worked as a fitter and turner.’

  With a pioneer’s passion, he says, ‘It was tough but there was a joy in living and a joy in the land. Today I can order French delicacies at a five-star hotel, but life was far better and people were more honest in the days when all I could get was three eggs per week on the ration card. On Yom Hatzma’ut, our independence day, we danced in the streets, rejoicing at what we were building up. I don’t see that simple joy any more. Now there are formal balls where people go to show off their outfits, furs and diamonds, so their friends should burst with envy.’

  Marcel describes life in those first years with the dreamy nostalgia that distance confers on even the toughest times. ‘I used to lug ice for our ice chest up the hill on my bicycle. Who dreamed of owning a fridge? In winter we were happy to find fuel for our little kerosine heater which smoked more than it heated. Every morning I used to run downstairs with a saucepan so that the milkman could pour milk into it from his churn. Sometimes I was in such a hurry that I got on the bus with a saucepan of milk in one hand and my briefcase in the other!’